Prior to eating primal, I really loved my organic peanut butter and hesitated to give it up. But I've found that my organic almond butter is much better! In fact, I have to restrict myself (which I didn't have to do with PB) because the almond butter is SO delicious.

I started eating it recently when it became available to me, so here are my thoughts. It's very calorically dense, and my purpose for eating it is to up my calories to gain mass. First I ate a kg of the mediocre stuff with soybean oil and some sugar.. In like 2-3 days. It's fairly easy to eat a lot of it without really feeling satisfied (even though I eat it with raw carrots). After eating a lot I would feel kinda tired. Gotten a bunch of organic 99.3% peanut + salt stuff now that I've been eating almost daily (albeit in lesser quantities). I don't get the same groggy feeling after eating it, and it has yet to give me digestive issues.

Botanically it is a legume and it contains lectins, but what many fail to recognize is that tree nuts contain phytates and other antinutrients themselves. Raw tree nuts can be soaked to counter these things, but my understanding is that not a lot of people here do that. Peanuts are also harrassed for their bad o3/o6 ratio, but this is just because it hardly contains any o3. The o3 in tree nuts is the seed kind ALA which only has a conversion rate to DHA/EPA of around 10% and is fairly useless. The actual o6 content of peanuts (it's prefferable to just minimize o6 consumption) is very similar to other tree nuts http://www.thepaleodiet.com/nutritio...uts_table.html

My conclusion: Good quality peanuts and peanut butter are no worse to consume than unsoaked paleo-acceptable tree nuts. If you don't tolerate peanut butter you can try soaking raw peanuts and make your own in a blender (just as you can tree nuts).
Your personal goals should still be considered when deciding whether or not to include peanut butter (and other nuts) in your diet. It is far from an optimal food for weightloss, and if you already have high levels of inflammation and gut issues it could very well worsen the issues.

I soak mine overnight in salty water and then dry them in the food dehydrator. The process improves the flavor and crunch of raw almonds and pecans, but does nothing for walnuts, IMO. I haven't tried macadamia nuts yet.

Give it time and you won't even like peanut butter anymore. I used to loooove it, stopped eating it for a month or two and now just the smell of it makes me gag.

The exact same thing happened to me. My little sister came home from school and we got the first jar of PB that's been in the house for a few months (we had to clear the house of it because I couldn't control myself - PB was my kryptonite). I, of course, took advantage of the opportunity and grabbed a TB full. It was like putting a TB of sugar in my mouth. Gross.

Like emmie said - have you tried Almond Butter yet? When I had my first bit of Almond Butter, I thought I died and went to Heaven. And THIS is coming from someone whose favorite food/vice used to be Peanut Butter. Just my two cents ).

"The Way We Do Anything Is the Way We Do Everything"
~ Kancho Cameron Shayne